Starting January 1, 2018, Paid Family Leave will provide employees with wage replacement and job protection to help them bond with a child, care for a close relative with a serious health condition, or help relieve family pressures when someone is deployed abroad on active military service. Employees are also entitled to be reinstated to their job when their leave ends and to the continuation of their health insurance during their leave.

The program will be phased in over the next four years. Starting in 2018, employees will be able to take eight weeks of leave at 50 percent of their weekly wage. Those numbers will increase annually until 2021, when it's 12 weeks at 67 percent.

A friend of mine, who is a salaried employee for a local small business, is running into some pretty serious difficulties with her boss that she feels could be infringing on her rights (forced unpaid overtime, threats to slash salary, verbal abuse, etc). Do any of your readers have any experience dealing with this kind of thing or know of anywhere she might be able to turn to learn more about her rights as a worker and find an acceptable solution?

This sounds like a stressful situation, even more so if you don't know where to start in figuring out how to address it.

So, have a suggestion for resources, strategies -- maybe even an attorney -- for Anonymous and their friend? Please share. And including sentence or two about why you're recommending a resource or person can be a big help.

The Troy Innovation Garage -- a new co-working space "aimed at the Capital Region's creative entrepreneurs" -- opened last week in a renovated building on Fourth Street in downtown Troy.

The project is backed by Tom Nardacci, the founder of local PR and marketing firm Gramercy Communications, which also has offices in the building. And it's probably the largest-scale attempt so far to open a co-working space similar to what you find in large cities.

So, where do all these people come from? Well, thanks to some recently released Census data, we can some sense of an answer to that question. And to extend the water metaphor a bit further, we can map out the "commuter sheds" that drain into each of the Capital Region's urban centers each weekday.

We got the impression that a lot of people found the anonymous job interviews we did for Work Week interesting, so we've decided to continue them as an occasional series.

On the job with: The Barista.

This person has been working in coffee for a decade -- as a barista, shift leader, and manager. The Barista talks about dealing with a stream of caffeine-seeking people, interpreting esoteric coffee lingo, and the people who camp out all day with their laptops...

It's Work Week on AOA. We'll be talking with people about their jobs and working. Part of that includes anonymous conversations with people about what it's like to do their jobs.

Next Up: The High School Teacher.

Or, to be more precise, the former high school teacher. The High School Teacher retired in 2011, but is currently teaching teachers in a UAlbany graduate education program. He taught for more than 30 years in Saratoga and shares some thoughts on how education, students, and the job of a high school teacher changed in that time.

It's Work Week on AOA, which is pretty much what it sounds like -- we're talking with people about their jobs and working.

Starting something new -- making your own job -- is hard. Especially if it requires leaving a steady paycheck, an eight-hour workday and weekends off (though there seem to be fewer and fewer of those jobs these days). It means risking security, time, and often cash. It means being prepared to learn, and sometimes, to fail.

And the further you get into a new venture, the more you'll learn things you probably wished you'd known at the start. We talked with a handful of Capital Region people who took a chance and started something of their own -- to create a job for themselves -- and asked them one question: If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself before starting your venture?

Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow, producers and directors of the Con Job project. Marlow on the way higher ed uses part-time professors: "I think we like to think of higher ed as protected from or different than that corporatization. ... But ultimately it's here and it's happening in the same way it's happening in many other sectors of the economy for the very same reasons."

It's Work Week on AOA, which is pretty much what it sounds like -- we're talking with people about their jobs and working.

When most of us think about the people who teach at colleges, we probably think of faculty with PhDs and tenure (or working toward it), teaching a few classes a semester, good pay, great job security, maybe a sabbatical.

In many situations, though, the reality of the higher education workforce is much different. Depending on how things are counted, somewhere between half and 3/4 of the people teaching in colleges and universities don't fit in that category of tenured or "tenure-track" faculty. They're part timers, "contingent labor." They're adjuncts.

Modern academia floats on a huge pool of people in this situation. In some cases, that's not a problem -- maybe it's a person teaching a course on the side of their regular job. But for many adjuncts, trying to piece together a full-time job and career, it can mean teaching multiple classes at multiple campuses for pay that approaches minimum wage levels with no benefits.

Part of that attention is a documentary project titled Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Labor, by two College of Saint Rose English professors: Megan Fulwiler and Jennifer Marlow. It aims to tell the stories of the adjuncts who teach first-year writing classes at many of the colleges in the Capital Region and beyond.

What they've found: people who say they feel invisible, living paycheck to paycheck, even as their labor makes the current system of modern higher education possible.

It's Work Week on AOA. We'll be talking with people about their jobs and working. Part of that includes anonymous conversations with people about what it's like to do their jobs.

First up: The Retail Clothing Store Manager.

She's worked at six retail stores during the past 16 years. And she has lots of stories -- about the good and bad of working with the public, a flesh-eating zipper, and people who have sex in the dressing room...

Do you -- yes, you, the person reading this -- tip on orders at food trucks, the morning swing through the line at the coffee place, a pick-up pizza or takeout order, counter service at a fast-casual restaurant, and other similar situations? If so, how much? And if not, why not?

In most situations, tipping is a social custom/expectation in this country. Which means it's one of those things that "everyone knows how it works" except that, you know, not everyone knows how it works. And like any social custom/expectation it's subject to an evolution of views on it, based on shifting attitudes and context.

Food service is currently in one of those shifts. Tipping on sit-down service is a well-established practice -- "everyone" knows you should tip 15-20 percent. But a lot of restaurant business is now headed in the direction of the "fast casual" model, or the super casual like food trucks.

We get the sense that's causing confusion. Just recently we were in a Chipotle (a prime example of fast casual) and the group ahead of us had ordered a long, complicated series of stuff. After it all came together, the woman who ordered it tried to tip the Chipotle cashier to thank her for getting the whole thing straight, but the cashier politely declined.

So what's the new social norm?

More about tipping: A recent Freakonomics podcast focused on tipping -- and featured a Cornell professor who's studied the topic extensively. He argued that tipping might be illegal because it could be considered discriminatory.

Check out the Capital Region's unemployment rate over the first half of this year, in the table above. (The state Department of Labor released June's numbers this week.)

The state's numbers for metro areas are not seasonally adjusted, so the best comparison for a month is the same month the year before (or before that and so on). After a small increase in January, each month since has registered a bigger decline from its counterpart the year before

Six months isn't necessarily a lot of a time, but it looks like an encouraging trend. And maybe it is. Another way of looking at the situation is to count how many people are employed, as opposed to unemployed.* We've put together those numbers for the Capital Region over the same period in a table after the jump. The picture from that angle is not quite as bright, though June did register a nice increase.

One (another) thing that would be interesting to know: How the pay of these new jobs compares to that of the jobs people previously had.

Saratoga County: It tied Tompkins County (Ithaca) for lowest unemployment rate in the state in June, at 5.7 percent.

New York State: The state's unemployment rate was 7.5 percent in June, the lowest mark since February 2009. It was down from 7.6 in May, and 8.7 in June 2012. (Statewide rates are seasonally adjusted.) The state added 93,800 non-farm jobs between June 2012 and June 2013, an increase of 1.1 percent.

One decision is about the use of a modern technology that's becoming ubiquitous -- GPS -- and governmental employees and their personal cars. The other is about an everyday thing that people might not think much about: tips at Starbucks.

Most of the time when we talk about "population" it's in reference to how many people live in a place. But that doesn't necessarily give the best sense of how many people frequent that city/town/village.

For example: the city of Albany's population on weekdays increases almost 67 percent during weekdays, according to Census Bureau estimates.

So, to get a better sense of how the population "tide" drifts around the Capital Region on a weekday, we thought it'd be interesting to pull daytime population numbers for cities, towns, and villages around the Capital Region -- and then rank and map them.

As if often mentioned, the unemployment rate includes people who are actively looking for a job. So it doesn't necessarily provide a picture of how many people have become frustrated and stopped looking, chosen a different path because employment prospects aren't good (examples: going to school, staying home with a kid), are under-employed -- or some combination of all the above.

Lowest rate: The county with the lowest unemployment rate in May was Tompkins County, which includes Ithaca, at 5.1 percent. Coincidentally, it was also named the "smartest" city in the nation recently by a company that does online brain training games. [Syracuse.com via Gannett Albany Watch]

I'm in the midst of exploring brand new career paths and I'm looking to work, ideally in person, with a career coach. I was wondering if there are any great career coaches, life coaches, or career consulting firms in the area that perhaps you or the AOA community could recommend.

It seems to us that this sort of thing could a few different ways. One way, the good way, would be finding a person who can help you work through figuring out what you really want to do, whether there's actually a job doing that, and how to get there. The other, less good way, would be someone who just tells you to follow your synergies while leveraging your enterprise solutions to find your cheese. Or something to that effect.

A coworking space called Beahive is scheduled to open in downtown Albany. The company opened its first coworking space in Beacon in 2009, and has another one in Kingston (that's a pic of the Beacon space on the right). From its page for the Albany space:

Our third hive should be open in the Capital Region at 418 Broadway (Downtown Albany) by March 2012.

We'll have a mix of work and lounge areas, meeting space, desks and tables, sofas and armchairs.

We expect to have members not only from Albany but also surrounding towns -- Troy, Rensselaer, Colonie and beyond.

Our space will also be available to rent for events, parties, workshops and group meetings, with flexible rates depending on the use.

There have been a fewattempts to get co-working spaces started in the Capital District. The Collar Collective is currently setting up in Troy. Its founder, Brian Corrigan, told us the plan is to start small with about 10 desks. And in order to keep the crowd more or less focused on tech, it will be nerds-only by application. Brian says it's very much open to nerds at-large, so if you're interested, contact him.

My husband is looking for a job in Albany as a mechanical engineer. Do you or your readers have any tips or suggestions as to what companies to hit up?

If you have a tip for Bridget, great -- please share.

But we want to broaden her question a bit, too. There are a lot of nerd-type* professionals in the AOA crowd -- and more every day as people move here for various industries, both tiny and large. So... if you're an engineer/scientist/software developer/awesome nerd new to the Capital Region, how do you get plugged into the scene here? Are there good groups or orgs to join? Networking opportunities? Please share!

I had a question for you and maybe the AOA readers could point me in the right direction. I'm new to web design and am wondering if there are any web design social groups in the capital district... groups where people get together with beers and binary, groups for drupal or word press, geeks who love to talk nerdy about html 5 and css... can you help a girl out?

What I want to know is, where is the best place in the capital region to take computer classes? Specifically, where is a good college/trade-school/company in the area to learn about web design, coding, programming and graphic design? I am looking for a career change and I have really great computer skills and I want to take my knowledge to the next level and try to secure a good job. I know I could do most of the learning online, but I'm really looking for a place to go and learn from a teacher for a reasonable price.

I was wondering if you or your readers could help me. I've been working on a freelance project that is winding to a close. The final piece is a presentation that I need to give showing how to use the system I built for them. My problem is, I don't know where to give it. I can't do it at my office since this is a side project and doing it at my home seems too unprofessional. This would only be three or four people involved in this so I wouldn't need much space. I would, however, need Internet access.

We've touched on the the lack of co-working space in the Capital Region before. Any businesses with conference room space that TD that might rent for a few hours? (If you don't feel comfortable posting in the comments, email us and we'll connect you.)

Much of AOA's work is not done in a traditional office. We'd guess that probably about 65 percent of our work is done in cafes, libraries, a car parked near a wi-fi spot, places like that. In fact, the text you're reading right now -- cafe.

All this time spent out and about has given us a chance to survey various non-office working spots in the Capital Region.

What's All Over Albany?

All Over Albany is for interested and interesting people in New York's Capital Region. In other words, it's for you. It's kind of like having a smart, savvy friend who can help you find out what's up. Oh, and our friends call us AOA.

... the back wall of the Albany Capital Center could really use a mural or interesting paint scheme or something. We think that every time... (more)

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The current property has been for sale for nearly 15 years. The owners are getting out of the Bowling business, it's happened all over the region. There's a buyer, and the city must evaluate the opportunity cost doing nothing. ...